【推荐1】Tired of dealing with those slow, dumb, and unfriendly hotel staff? How about a hotel that provides chance for minimal interaction with the" people" running the hotel? In the Henn Na Hotel in Japan, there aren’t any!

Being called “Weird Hotel” by locals, the Henn Na Hotel opened in 2016 in the town of Sasebo, is staffed almost by robots. The robots are not just for fun. They do a large amount of work, saving time and money as well. They can greet you when you enter. Also, they play music in the lounge, inform you of the breakfast menu, and control the lights in your hotel room, etc.

Thinking that the hotel should be unique and appealing, the owners made each robot different from each other with a variety of shapes and sizes. One of the robots behind the front desk is designed to look like a dinosaur, “If you want to check in, push one.” the dinosaur says. Then the guest can type the information on a touch panel screen. Inside the room, there’s a small robot called Tuly in the shape of a pink tulip (郁金香). Tuly can answer simple questions like "what time is it?" and "What will the weather be like tomorrow?" With no switches on the wall, Tuly can also turn the room lights on or off if it's told to.

But how do things like check-in and room access work? Well, the screen at the reception captures and registers a digital image of the guest's face during check-in which is used to get access 10 rooms instead of traditional keys. However. the reception shall also provide you card keys on request in case you wish to keep it subtle!

If you're wondering what happens in the case of an emergency, you need not worry. Humans do step in when it's of great importance. According to the hotels website, there are a few human staff members who are available on-call 24X7 and help guests in the case of an emergency.

【推荐2】Sue Hendrickson is a self-taught fossil（化石）hunter. As a kid, Sue Hendrickson often walked with her head down. “People said, ‘Look up. Smile!” she says. “Now, I realize I was born to look for things and just didn’t know it.”

Sue Hendrickson does more than look—she finds valuable things: Shipwrecks（沉船）with treasure, ancient sunken cities, and in 1990, she found Sue, the world’s largest, most complete Tyrannosaurus rex（霸王龙）. Is Hendrickson lucky? Well, maybe. But she also knows how to look.

“I limit the area where I’m going to look,” she says. No one knew the location of the sunken ship San Diego in the Philippines. For a year, Hendrickson and other researchers searched papers and sailors’ diaries. “The descriptions of the ship’s sailors led us to the wreck,” she says. The team also used a tool that can respond to metal. This tool found the San Diego. All the work paid off. The 400-year-old ship was complete, with valuable gold and silver coins.

To find the dinosaur she calls “the biggest animal that ever walked on earth,” Hendrickson started with maps made to search for oil. What Hendrickson found was the largest and most complete T-rex found to date. The T-rex is 42 feet long with 200 bones! Because it is so complete, scientists were able to infer that Sue walked at about 6 miles per hour and did not run faster than 15 miles an hour. Before Sue was discovered, they thought T-rex was much faster. To learn more about T-rex Sue, go to the Field Museum in Chicago.

There’s plenty left to be found, Hendrickson says, including answers to mysterious such as how T-rex lived. “I tell kids that they need to grow up and work them out because all of us old persons haven’t yet!”

【推荐3】NASA has big plans for returning astronauts to the moon in 2024, a stepping stone on the path to sending humans to Mars. But where should the first people on the Red Planet land? While there are lots of places on Mars scientists would like to visit, few would make practical landing sites for astronauts. Thanks to the researchers, their newly-published paper in Geophysical Research Letters will help by providing a map of water ice believed to be as little as an inch (2. 5 centimeters) below the surface.

Water ice will be a key consideration for any potential landing site. With little room to spare aboard a spacecraft, any human missions to Mars will have to harvest what’s already available for drinking water. Liquid water can’t last in the thin air of Mars. With so little air pressure, it turns from a solid to a gas when exposed to the atmosphere. On this planet, water ice is locked away underground. Buried water ice changes the temperature of the Martian surface, so the study’s authors relied on heat-sensitive instruments to find ice that astronauts could easily dig up. The authors of the new paper make use of data from spacecrafts to locate water ice that could potentially be within reach of astronauts on the Red Planet.

The paper’s lead author, Sylvain Piqueux of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California said, ‘‘We’re continuing to collect data on buried ice on Mars, aiming to find the best places for astronauts to land.” Piqueux is planning a comprehensive campaign to continue studying buried ice across different seasons, watching how the abundance of this resource changes over time.

【推荐1】Crude oil (原油) taken from fields in Alaska's North Slope near Prudhoe Bay is carried by tube to the port of Valdez. From there it is shipped by tanker to the West Coast of the United States. Just after midnight on March24, 1989,the Exxon Valdez, a tanker more than three football fields long, went off course in Prince William Sound near Valdez and hit rocks underwater. About 42 million liters of oil poured out from several slices in the ship, creating the worst escape of oil ever in the U. s. waters.

In 1990，the National Transportation Safety Board NTSB) found the captain of the tanker guilty of drinking before sailing and of leaving the bridge and turning over the ship to an inexperienced and tired third mate. The NTSB ruled that the accident was the result of drinking of the captain, an overworked crew member, and inadequate traffic control by the Coast Guard.

In the early 1970s, conservationists said that a large, damaging oil escape would occur in these dangerous waters containing hidden rocks and frequented by icebergs and violent storms. They urged that Alaskan oil be brought to the lower 48 states by tube over land to reduce potential damage.

Officials of Alyeska, a company formed by the seven oil companies taking oil from Alaska's North Slope, said that a tube would take too long to build and that a large escape of oil was " highly unlikely". They assured Congress that they would be at the scene of any accident within five hours and have enough equipment and trained people to clean up any spill. However, when the S4-ilion Valdez leak occurred, Alyeska and Exxon officials did too little too late.

In the early 1970s, Secretary of the Interior Rogers Morton told Congress that all oil tankers using Alaskan waters would have double hulls( 船体). Later, under pressure from oil companies, the requirement was dropped. After the disaster,the oil industry had much to answer for. The accident led to an international push for double-hulled oil tankers.What if the Exxon Valdez had a double hull?

【推荐2】As 17-year-old Torri’ell Norwood drove through Florida, last February, the laughter and chatter from the four teenage girls inside her car quickly gave way to screams. As they approached an intersection, another car T-boned them, sending their car sailing into the yard of a nearby home, coming to a stop only when it crashed into a tree.

As smoke rose from the car, a bystander shouted, “It’s about to blow up! Get out!” Shaken, but otherwise OK, Norwood crawled out through the window as the driver’s side door couldn’t be opened. Along with two of her friends, who’d also managed to free themselves, she ran for her life. But halfway down the street, she realized that her best friend, Simmons, wasn’t with them. Norwood ran back and found Simmons unconscious in the back seat. She threw open the back door and pulled her friend out. She dragged Simmons a few feet to safety and laid her on the ground. After checking her pulse and found there was no sign of life, she started CPR.

Had the accident happened a few weeks earlier, she might not have known what to do. But just the day before, Norwood, who wanted to pursue a career in medicine, had earned her CPR certificate by learning on her own. Kneeling on the lawn and looking down at her dying friend, Norwood knew she had precious little time to practice what she’d learned.

She started pumping Simmons’s chest with her interlocked fingers and breathing into her friend's mouth in hopes of filling her lungs with the kiss of life. After quite a while, Simmons began coughing and taking quick deep breaths for air. The CPR had worked! Soon, the ambulance arrived and rushed Simmons to the hospital. And then she heard how her best friend had saved her life. “I wasn't shocked,” Simmons told others. “She will always help any way she can.”

【推荐3】New York factories in the early 1900s were busy and dangerous places to work. Most factories were housed in brick buildings that were overly hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter. Workers at the time often worked more than 12 hours each day, receiving few breaks and no overtime pay. The floors were crowded with people and equipment, and the doors were often locked to prevent employees from leaving early. In fact, most factory owners and managers mistreated those who asked for changes or directly fired them. The people in charge believed that they did not owe anything more than a paycheck to their workers.

Everything changed when a fire broke out at the Triangle shirtwaist factory in 1911. During that tragic event, about a quarter of the workers (mostly young immigrant women) lost their lives. The factory workers, located on the ninth floor of the building, could not get the door open. The fire escape led only to flames below. The fire truck ladders were not long enough, nor were the water hoses (水管). Fire nets were inadequate.

After the fire, people marched and protested in order to change conditions in factories. Many large protests took place in New York. Eventually, politicians took up the cause, and legislators (立法者) passed workplace laws regulating child labor and the number of workers allowed on a floor. They also called for sprinkler systems (自动喷水系统) to be placed in all factories. The rights of workers were important and valuable.

Today, working in a factory is still a demanding, difficult, and often dangerous job. The victims of the Triangle shirtwaist factory did not die in vain, however. Because of their experience, the workplace was forever changed for the better.

【推荐1】I used to think the whole purpose of life was pursuing happiness. Everyone said the path to happiness was success, so I searched for that ideal job, that perfect boyfriend, and that beautiful apartment. But instead of ever feeling fulfilled, I felt anxious and lost. Eventually. I decided to go to graduate school for positive psychology to learn what truly makes people happy.

And what's the difference between being happy and having meaning in life? Many psychologists describe happiness as a state of comfort and ease, feeling good in the moment. Meaning, though, is deeper. The famous psychologist Martin Seligman says meaning comes from belonging to and serving something beyond yourself and from developing the best within you. Our culture is obsessed with happiness, but I came to see that seeking meaning is the more fulfilling path.

There are four pillars of a meaningful life.

The first pillar is belonging. Belonging comes from being in relationships where you're valued for who you are and where you value others as well. For many people, belonging is the most essential source of meaning.

For others, the key to meaning is the second pillar: purpose. Finding your purpose is not the same thing as finding that job that makes you happy. A doctor told me her purpose is healing sick people. Many parents tell me, “My purpose is raising my children.” The key to purpose is using your strengths to serve others. Without something worthwhile to do, people flounder, thus losing the aim of life.

The third pillar of meaning is also about stepping beyond yourself, but in a completely different way: transcendence (超然). Transcendent experiences can change you. Transcendent states are those rare moments when you're lifted above the hustle and bustle of daily life, your sense of self fades away, and you feel connected to a higher reality. For me, I’m a writer, and it happens through writing. Sometimes I get so in the zone that I lose all sense of time and place.

The fourth pillar is storytelling, the story you tell yourself about yourself. Creating a narrative from the events of your life brings clarity. It helps you understand how you became you. But we don’t always realize that we're the authors of our stories and can change the way we’re telling them. Your life isn't just a list of events. You can edit, interpret and retell your story, even as you're constrained by the facts.

That’s the power of meaning. Happiness comes and goes. But when life is really good and when things are really bad, having meaning gives you something to hold on to.

【推荐2】We often hear honesty is the best policy, and no one likes to be called a liar.But is dishonesty always wrong? Not necessarily.

According to psychologists,there are two types of lies: lies that help your relationships and the people around you are called pro­social lies; and lies that hurt them are called antisocial lies.

How often have you clicked “Like” on Wechat Moment, not because you actually like what your friends posted, but because you want to show your support? This white lie is an example of a pro­social lie. But when people tell lies on social networks to make their own lives seem more exciting，or to make others jealous, this is antisocial lying.

Workplace lies range from harmless lies to destructive untruthful statements. An example of a pro­social workplace lie is complimenting someone on their presentation — even though it was only average — because you know they were nervous beforehand. In this case your intention is simply to protect your colleague’s feelings. However, people sometimes tell bigger lies at work for the purpose of avoiding blame or to stay on the boss’s good side. These are antisocial lies. They are antisocial because your boss is likely to discover the truth and as a result, will probably stop trusting you.

Lying is also a significant part of the natural world. So it’s little wonder we resort to it almost reflexively. Human babies sometimes pretend to cry, check to see if anyone is listening, and then start crying again. By the age of five, children learn to say things that are completely untrue, and most nine-­year­olds have mastered keeping secrets to protect themselves.

Lying can be incredibly harmful to our relationships and to the people around us. But that’s only true for antisocial lies. Pro­social lies have the opposite effect — they can actually help us.